Into respiratory act is
the secret of life

“Ordinary” life has its rules. I define
as “Ordinary” the life that is “manifest” and
characterized by a physical-material “insentient” (Prakrti)
expression, a non physical-material “sentient” (Purusa)
expression and a force that joins the both of them
together that I call “Ahankara”.
In fact, when a human being leaves this life (honestly,
I cannot exclude other kinds of existence) the proof of
what I said appears clearly.
Every time I am present at a death, it seems to me even
too evident that the departure of the “sentient” part
can be the cause of the deactivation of the
physical-material component, but, in that occasion, as a
scholar, I always and immediately ask to myself: what is
the possible reason of the ended cooperation of the
“sentient” and “non-sentient” two parts? And why, in
this case, the two parts untie themselves?
This last question always represented to me the implicit
admission of the existence of a third force that I
called “Ahamkara”, universal force that is into the
whole manifest universe. On a physical-material level,
for example on the Earth, it is called force of gravity
whereas, on a non-material level, it causes the ego.
I don’t want to talk at length about these ancient
thrilling intuitions of the indian Masters, even because
the main purpose of my work is to talk about the
specific forces that are active in the human body, and
about the respiratory act that is an evident
manifestation of it.
These observations are mainly for explaining what I mean
when I talk about “ordinary life”, when I talk about the
breathing, instead, it shows itself, as everybody knows,
into its three forms: breathing in, abstention from
breathing and breathing out.
When we are born, or when we start to manage our
existence by ourselves, after the cut of the umbilical
cord, the first one of these three functions that
appears is the breathing in. Naturally, it’s not
coincidence: I never believed in chance even before that
indian wisdom took every doubt away from me. In nature
everything seems to answer to the laws of existence and
the manifestation is a well-ordered action (karma).
So, I can say, and it’s not coincidence, that life
begins with a breathing in and ends with a breathing out
and it can also be considered as a collection of
breathings: every day, as lot of people knows, we
breath, depending on our state and on outside
conditions, from 15.000 to 20.000 times.
The disciples of some interesting oriental disciplines
even believe that, at birth, a certain number of
breathings is given to us. They also practice promoting
and using a more conscious breathing, deeper and slower
(that is supposed to lengthen life). The consciousness,
then, allows to grasp the living and spiritual meaning
of this act and of every single phase of it.
The meditation on breathing brought me to understand,
for example, that the breathing in is tightly connected
to the force of survival, the same one that supports
life by feeding it: to breathe in, in fact, is
expression of assimilating in physical and psychological
way. This energy, in our being, takes on the
responsibility for its structure, for the protection
(related not only to the immune defences but also to the
mucus and the lubricating substances).
Called “kapha” by the ones that practice the indian
ayurvedic medicine, it is strongly connected with the
sense of taste, of smell and of pleasure “in general”.
The important functions of existence are tightly
connected to the sense of pleasure: to breathe in, to
drink, to eat, to make love, all of these actions give
pleasure. Through sexuality, in fact, life holds itself
up, reproduces and extends.
Of course a healthy life follows from the consciousness
that, transforming itself into knowledge, it lets pursue
the right things and not only the things that we like.
The attachment to pleasure, for example to the pleasure
of drinking, as everyone knows, brings to dependency and
to alcoholism. And it’s like this for any other aspect
of pleasure.
The breathing in represents the force that, for
sustenance, brings the external “life” to us, for giving
it to the “transformation” that has the aim of adapting
it to our needs of survival.
The result of the breathing in, through the blood,
reaches the cells, where, through oxidation, it becomes
useful and adaptable. With the word “transformation” I
want to refer not only to this process, but to every
process that has the aim of digesting something that,
coming from outside (for example food, emotions), after
it’s been transformed, goes to take part of the personal
existence and constitution.
In the discipline that I practise, this process is
called “Pitta”, and it has, in the abstention from
breathing, its main expression. The work of
“transforming” is given to the element Fire, main
component of this agent (Dosa), in fact, if we could
indicate the percentage of presence, we would say that
it is the 70% out of the total, while the water is only
the 30%.
Therefore, to understand the way we work, it is enough
to think about when we see a good apple: Kapha gives the
desire of eating it, we take it and start to chew it
with pleasure, it is still apple in the mouth, in the
oesophagus, but, when it reaches the stomach, it suffers
that process of transformation that we usually call
digestion, and, in three or four hours, a part of this
apple flows into our body as plasma, becoming an
integral part of ourselves.
From a scientific (and not only scientific) point of
view, this is very interesting, especially in relation
with the emotional level: the reader do not forget in
any case that, as it is in the tradition of this medical
discipline, the psychosomatic constitution of the human
being.
For a deeper and easier understanding of this aspect, I
say, when I have lessons with my scholars, they listen
to my words through the sense of hearing, but they can
understand and learn the things I say, until they become
integral part of their knowledge, through a kind of
Pitta in the head called “Sadaka Pitta”.
Going back to the process of assimilating the apple, I
state that only a part of it, the one that is useful,
goes to take a part of the individual constitution,
beginning to flow into the plasma, the useless or
harmful part take the way of elimination. This is one of
the jobs (the main one is the movement in general) of
the third force that we go to discover and that, in our
discipline, is called “Vata”. The elimination, as
everybody knows, happens through the breathing out, the
perspiration, the urine, the excrements, etc.
In conclusion, I wish that, through this few lines, I
make my readers able to understand that the health
depends on the democratic management of these three
forces. The presence of “fanatics” in the “Dosa” (Kapha,
Pitta, Vata) causes the arise of the illness.
The “Dosa”, if proposed using the terms of the modern
physics, can nearly correspond to the inertia (Kapha),
the energy (Pitta) and the movement (Vata).
Into respiratory act they can also meet the breathing
in, the abstention from the breathing and the breathing
out.